One of a number of tried and tested technique for teaching work that students find hard to learn found in teaching tricks and tips
accept
Accepting that learning of some topics will interfere with other topics is the first step to recovery.
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The plan for this page is to build up examples as above and include links to "teaching Higher work to Foundation students" videos and more easy on the eye student "remind-me" videos. For now though here is a list of situations where we have found asking students to focus on the difference between two problems has helped.
Here are a number of problems that will interfere with each other initially
simplify sum and/or product
Once we start to teach how to simplify h x h x h x h students lose their confidence in knowing that h + h + h + h = 4h .... so as soon as you teach h x h x h x h get students to work on and compare with h + h + h + h type problems, ideally in a mixed bag over time.
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simplifypq: h x h x h x h intro
area and/or perimeter
With two concepts are ubiquitously confused by students such as area and perimeter, we know that after teaching one carefully - to what seems like mastery - when the other is introduced most students will become confused. We encourage students to embrace this confusion and encourage them to self reflect
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If students believe that most people run into the confusion that they have encountered, and that there is a logical way through the problem, and that a pause for thought leads to an accurate answer and most importantly the students encounter as many instances in their timely practice assignments as required to accurately match the name of the concept with the concept then the teaching and learning process will succeed.
factor and/or multiple
Teach multiple typeOFnumber1.pdf but as soon as you begin to teach factor compare the two typeOFnumber2.pdf and give a hint of how to distinguish.
all the factors of ... and/or write ... as a product of its prime factors
Personally (assuming students find division hard to do) I like to teach students to write a number as its prime factors before I get them to find all the factors of the number, as
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factorPRIME - FACTORproductOFprime FFMcomparePPFM
HCF and/or LCM
factorPRIME - HCF 84 and 90 quick
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